E451 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



D0DD173flD45 



THE LESSON OF THE HOUR. 



LECTUHE OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 

DELIVERED AT 

BKOOKLYN, N. Y., 
> ij^ Tuesday Evening, TTovember 1, 1859. 



Ladies and Gentlemen — I speak with the utmost 
sincerity when I say that I cannot expect — speaking 
from this phatform* and to you — to say anything on 
the vital question of the hour, which you have not 
already heard, I should not, in that sense, willing- 
ly have come here ; but, when a groat question di- 
vides the community, all men are called upon to 
vote, and I feel to-night that [ am simply giving 
my vote. I am only saying ' ditto ' to what you 
hear from this platform day after day. And I 
would willingly have avoided, ladies and gentlemen, 
even at this last moment, borrowing this hour from 
you. I tried to do better bj you. Like the Irish- 
man in the story, I offered to hold the hat of Hon. 
Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, (enthusiastic applause,) 
if he would only make a speech, and, most unac- 
countably, I am sorry to say, he declined this gener- 
ous offer. (Laughter.) So I must fulnl my ap- 
pointment, and deliver my little lecture myself. 

' The Lesson of the Hour? ' I think the lesson 
of the hour is insurrection. [Sensation.] Insur- 
rection of thought always precedes the insurrection 
of arms. The last twenty years have been insurrec- 
tion of thought. We seem to be entering on a new 
phase of the great moral American struggle. It 
seems to me that we have never accepted, as Amer- 
icans — we have never accepted our own civiiizatiou 



2 

We have held back from the inference which we 
ouj:;lit to liavc draAvn from the admitted ytrinciriles 
which underlie our life. AVe have all the timidity 
of the old world, when we bend our eyes upon ideas 
of tlie people ; we siirink hack, trying to save our- 
selves from the inevitable might of the thoughts of 
the millions. The idea of civilization on the other 
side of the water seems to he, that man is created 
to be taken care of by somebody else. Cod did not 
leave him tit to go alone ; he is in everlasting pupil- 
age to the wealthy and the educated. The religious 
or the comfortable classes are an ever-j>resent probate 
court to take care of him. The Old World, there- 
fore, has always distrusted the average conscience — 
the common sense of the millions. 

It seems to me the idea of our civilization — under- 
lying all American life — is, that we do not need any 
protector. We need no safeguard. Not only the 
inevitable, but the best, power this side of the ocean, 
is the unfettered average common sense of the masses. 
Institutions, as we are accustomed to call them, are 
but pasteboard, and intended to be against the 
thought of the street. Statutes are mere mile- 
stones, telling how far yesterday's thought had trav- 
elled ; and the talk of the sidewalk to-day is the 
law of the land. Somewhat briefly stated, such is 
the idea of American civilization ; uncompromising 
faith — in the average sellishness, if you choose — 
of all classes, neutralizing each other, and tending 
toward that fair play that Saxons love. It seems 
to me that, on all questions, we dread thought ; 
wo shrink behind something ; we acknowledge 
ourselves unequal to the sublime faith of our 
fathers ; and tiie exhibition of the last twenty years 
and of the prtvsent state of public afi'airs is, that 
Americans dread to look their real position in the 
face. 

They say in Ireland that every Irishman thinks 



3 

that he wag born sixty days too late — (laughter) — 
and the world owes iiim sixty days. The conse- 
quence is, when a trader says such a tiiino; is so 
much for cash, thelrishman thinks cash moans to him 
a bill ot sixty days. (Laughter.) So it is with 
Americans. They have no idiia of absolute right. 
They were born since 1787, and absolute right 
means the truth diluted by a strong decoction of the 
Constitution of '89. They are ail in that atmos- 
phere ; they don't want to sail outside of it ; they 
"do not attempt to reason outside of it. For the 
last twenty years, there has been going on, more 
or less heeded and understood in various States, an 
insurrection of ideas against the limited, cribbed, 
cabined, isolated American civilization, interfering 
to restore absolute right — not only that, but the 
recognition and conviction of absolute truth. If 
you said to an American, for instance, anything in 
regard to temperance, slavery, or any tiling else — in 
the course of the last twenty years — anything about a 
principle, he ran back instantly to the safety of such 
a principle — to the possibility of its existing v.ith a 
peculiar sect, with a church, with a party, with a 
constitution, with a law. He had not yet ruised him- 
self unto the level of daring to trust justice, which 
is the preliminary consideration to trusting the peo- 
ple ; for whether native depravity be true or not, it 
is a truth, attested by all liistory, that the race grav- 
itates towards justice, and that indulging all differ- 
ences of opinion, there is an inherent, essential ten- 
dency to the great English principle of fair-play at 
the bottom of our natures. (Loud applause.) The 
Emperor Nicholas, it is said, ordered Col. ^Fhistler, 
one of his Engineers, to lay down for him a road for 
a railway from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and pres- 
ently the engineers brought him in a large piece of 
fine card-paper, on which was laid dovv'n, like a 
snake, the designed path for the iron locomotive be- 



twcon the two capitals. 'What's that?' said 
Nicholas. 'That's the bcsti'Mad,' was the reply. 
' What do you uiake it crooked for? ' ' Why, wo 
turn this way to touch this great city, and to tho 
h^ft to reach that iiniuense mass of people, and to 
the right again to suit the business of that dis- 
trict.' 'Yes.' The Emperor turned the card over, 
made a new dot for Moscow and another for St. 
Petersburg, took a ruler, made a straight line, and 
said, ' Build me that road.' (Laughter.") 

' But what will become of that depot of trade, of • 
that town?' 'I don't know; they must look out 
for themselves.' [Cheers.] And the emperor of 
omnipotent Democracy says of slavery, or of a 
church, ' Tiiis is justice, and that is iniquity; 
the track of (Jod's thunderbolt goes in a straigiit 
line from one to the other, and the church that 
cannot stand itmustsLandout of the way.' [Cheers.] 
Now our object for twenty years has been to edu- 
cate the mass of the American people up to that 
level of moral life, w^hich shall recognize that free 
speech carried to that extent is God's normal 
school, educating the American mind, throwing 
upon it the grave responsibility of deciding a great 
question, and by means of tiiat respon^^ibility, lift- 
ing it to the higher level of an intellectual and 
DKjral life. Now scholarship stands on one side, 
and, like your Brooklyn Eaijlc, says, ' Tliis is mad- 
ness!' Well, poor man I he thinks so ! [Laughter ] 
The very difliculty of the whole nuxtter is tliat he 
does think so, and tiiis noruuil school that we open 
is for him. His seat is on the lowest end of the 
lowest l)ench. [Laughter and a]i]iluuse.] Hut lie 
only represents that very chronic distrust which per- 
vades all that class. It is the timid, educated mind of 
these Northern States. Anacharsis went into the 
forum at AthtMis, and heard a case argued by the 
2,reat minds of tlie day, and saw the vote. He 



■walked out into the streets, and somebody said to 
him, ' What think you of" Athenian liberty?' ' I 
think,' said he, ' wise men argue causes, and fools 
decide them.' Just what the tiuiid scholar two 
thousand years ago said in the streets of Athens, 
that which calls itself the scholarship of the United 
States says to-day of popular agitation — that it 
lets wise men argue questions, and fools decide 
them. But that early Athens, where fools de- 
cided the gravest questions of polity and right 
and wrong, w^here it was not safe to be just, and 
where property might be wrung from you by the 
prejudices of the mob to-morrow, which you had 
garnered up by the thrift and industry of to-day ; 
that very Athens invented art, and sounded for us 
the depths of philosophy ; God lent to it the noblest 
intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds 
yet the mountain peaks of the old world ; while E- 
gypt, the hunker conservative of antiquity, where 
nobody dared to differ from the priest, or to be wis- 
er than his grandfather — where men pretended to 
be alive, though swaddfed in the grave-clothes of 
creed and custom as close as their mummies in linen 
— is hid in the tomb it inhabited ; and the intellect 
which Athens has created for us digs to-day tliose 
ashes to find out what hunkerism knew and did. 
[Cheers. J Now my idea of American civilization 
is that it is a second part, a repetition of that 
same sublime confidence in the public conscience 
and the public thought that made the ground- 
work of Grecian Democracy. 

Well, we have been talking for twenty years. 
There have been various evidences of growth in educa- 
tion ; I will tell you of one. The first evidence that a 
sinner convicted of sin, and too blind or too lazy 
to reform — the first evidence that he can give that 
his nature has been touched, is that he becomes a 
hypocrite ; he has the grace to pretend to be some- 



thinn;. Now, the first evidence that tlie American 
people gave of that commencing grace of hypoc- 
risy ^^•as thi.s : in 183o, wlien we commenced the 
Anti-Slavery agitation, the papers talked ahout 
slavery, bondage, American slavery, boldly, frankly 
and bluntly. In a lew years it soundcd"^ hard ; it 
had a grating effect ; the hardest throat of the 
hardest Democrat felt it as it came out. So they 
spoke of the 'patriarchal institution,' (laughter,) 
then of the ' domestic instituti<m,' (continued 
laughter,) and then of the 'peculiar institution,' 
(laughter) — and in a year or two it got l)eyond 
that. Mississippi published a report from her 
Senate, in which she went a stride beyond, and 
described it as 'economic subordination.' (Re- 
newed laughter.) A Southern Methodist bishop 
was taken to task for holding slaves in reality, but 
his Methodist brethren were not courageous enough 
to say 'slaves' right out in meeting, and so they 
said the bishop must get rid of his ' impediment ' — 
(loud laughter) — and tlie late Mr. Rufus Ciioate, in 
the last Democratic canvass in my own State, under- 
taking and necessitated to refer to the institutions 
of the South, and knowing that his old New Eng- 
land lips, that had spoken so many glorious free 
truths in the twenty years that were ended, could 
not foul their last days with the hated word, 
phrased it 'a different type of industry.' Now, 
hypocrisy — wiiy, 'it is' the homage that Vice 
renders to Virtue.' When men begin to get weary 
of capital punishment, they banish the gallows 
inside the jail-yard, and do not let anybody see it 
without a special card of invitation from the sheriff. 
And so they have banished slavery into pet phrases 
and fancy Hash- words. If you should dig our 
Egyptian Ilunkerism up fron the grave into which 
it is rapidly sinking, we sliould have to get a com- 
mentator of the true German blood to find out what 



all these queer, odd, peculiar, imaginative paraphra- 
ses mean in this middle of the Nineteenth Century. 
That was one evidence of progress. 

I believe in moral suasion. I believe the age of 
bullets is over. I believe the age of ideas is come. I 
think that is the preaching of our country. The old 
Hindoo dreamed, you know, that he saw the human 
race led out to its varied fortune. First, he saw 
men bitted anl curbed, and the reins went back to 
an iron hand. But his dream changed on and on, 
until at last he saw men led by reins that came from 
the brain, and went back into an unseen hand. It 
was the type of governments ; the first a govern- 
ment of despotism, palpable iron ; and the last our 
government, a government of brains, ;» government 
of ideas. I believe in it — in public opinion. 

Yet, let me say, in passing, that I think you can 
make a better use of iron tlian forging it into 
chains. If you must have the metal, put it into 
Sharpe's rifles. It is a great deal better used that 
way than in fetters — a great deal better than in a 
clumsy statue of a mock great man, for hypocrites 
to kneel down and worship in a State-house yard. 
[Loud and renewed cheers and great hissing.] I am 
80 unused to hisses lately that I have forgotten what 
I had to say. [Laughter and hisses.] I only 
know I meant what I did say. 

My idea is, public opinion, literature, education, 
as governing elements. 

But some men seem to think that our institutiona 
are necessarily safe because we have free schools 
and cheap books, and a public opinion that con- 
trols. But that is no evidence of safety. India 
and China have had schools, and a school system 
almost identical with that of Massachusetts, for 
fifteen hundred years. And books are as cheap in 
Central and Northern Asia as they are in New 
York. But they have not secured liberty, nor 



8 

secured a contr(>lling pul)lic opinion to cither na- 
tion. Spain for three centuries had municipalities 
and town govornments, as independent and si-lf- 
supportinj!:;, and as representative of thouo;ht, as 
New Enghmd or New Yt.rk has. But that did not 
save Spain. De Toqueville says that fifty years be- 
fore the great revolution, public opinion was as 
omnipotent in France as it is to-day, but it did not 
save France. You cannot save men by machinery. 

'^'AYhat India and France and Spain wanted was live 
men, and that is what we want to-day ; men who 
are willing to look their own destiny, and their own 
functions, and their own responsibilities in the face. 

«^ ' Grant me to see, and Ajax asks no more,' was the 
prayer that the great poet put into the lips of his 
hero in the darkness that overspread the Grecian 
camp. All we want of American citizens is the 
opening of their own eyes, and seeing things as they 
are. To the intelligent, thoughtful and determined 
gaze of twenty millions of Cliristian people, there is 
nothing — no institution wicked and powerful enough 
to be capable of standing against it. In Keats's 
beautiful poem of ' Lamia,' a young man had been 
led captive by a phantom girl, and was the slave of 
her beauty, until the old teacher came in and 
fixed his thoughtful eye upon the figure, and it 
vanished, and the pujnl started up himself again. 

You see the great Commonwealth of A'irginia 
fitly represented by a pyramid standing upon 
its apex. A Connecticut ))orn man entered at one 
corner of her dominions, and fixed iiis cold grey eye 
upon the government of Yirginia, and it almost 
vanished in his very gaze. For it seems that A'irginia 
asked leave ' to be ' of John Brown at Harper's 
Ferry. (Cheers and applause.) Connecticut has 
sent out many a school-master to the other thirty 
States ; but never before so grand a teacher as 
that Li tcl field-born school-master at Harper's 



9 

Ferry, writing upon the Natural Bridge in the face 
of nations his simple copy : ' Resistance to Tyrants 
is obedience to God.' (Loud cheers.) 

I said that the lesson of the hour was insurrec- 
tion. I ought not to apply that word to John 
Brown of Ossawatomie, for tliere was no insurrec 
tion in his case. It is a great mistake to call him 
an insurgent. This principle that I have endeavor- 
ed so briefly to open to you, of absolute right and 
wrong, states what? Just this : ' Commonwealth of / 
Virginia !' There is no such thing. No civil society, 
no government can exist, except on the basis of 
the willing submission of all its citizens, and by 
the performance of the duty of rendering equal -^ 
justice between man and man. 

Everything that calls itself a Gr)vernment, and re- ^ 
fuses that dut}/, or has not that assent, is no Govern- 
ment. It is only a pirate sliip. Virginia, ihe '^ 
Commonwealth of Virginia ! She is only a chronic 
insurrection. 1 mean exactly what I say. I am 
weighing my words now. She is a pirate ship, / 
and John Brown sails the sea a Lord High Admiral 
of the Almighty, with his commission to sink every 
pirate he meets on God's ocean oi the nineteenth j 
century. (Cheers and applause.) I mean literally 
and exactly what I say. In God's world there are 
no majorities, no minorities ; one, on God's side, is 
a majority. /You have often heard here, doubtless, 
and I need not tell you the ground of morals The 
rights of that one man are as sacred as those of the 
miscalled Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia is 
only another Algiers. The barbarous horde who 
gag each other, imprison women for teaching chil- 
dren to read, prohibit the Bible, sell men on the 
auction-blocks, abolish marriage, condemn half 
their women to prostitution, and devote themselves 
to the breeding of human beings for sale, is only a 
larger and blacker Algiers. The only prayer of a 



10 

true man for such is, * Cfracious Iloavon ! unless 
they rt'piiut, send soon their Exiiiouth and Decatur.' 
J')!in lirown has twice as much rijilit to hang CJov. 
AVise as (Jov. Wise has to hang him. (Chcrs and 
liisses.) You see I am talking of tiiat ahsolute 
essence of things that lives in the sight of tlio 
Eternal and the Infinite : not as men judge it in 
the rotten morals of the nineteenth century, among 
a herd of States that calls itself an em[)ire hecause 
it weaves cottiui and sells slaves. Wliat I say is 
this: Harper's Ferry was the only government in 
that vicinity. Respecting the trial, Virginia, true 
to herself, has shown exactly the same haste tiiat 
tiic pirate does when lie tries a nuxn on deck, and 
runs him up to the yard-arm. Unconsciously she 
is consistent. Now, you do not think this to-day, 
some of you, perhaps. But I tell you what absolute 
History shall judge of these forms and phantoms of 
ours. John Brown began his life, his active life, in 
Kansas. The South planted that seed; it reaps 
the first fruit now. Twelve years ago, the great 
men in Washington, the AVebsters and the Clays, 
planted the Mexican war; and they reaped their 
appropriate fruit in Gen. Taylor and Gen. Pierce 
pushing them from their statesmen's stools. The 
South planted the seeds of violence in Kansas, and 
taught peaceful Northern men familiarity with the 
bowie-knife and revolver. They planted 099 seeds, 
and this is the first one that has flowered ; this is 
the first drop of the coming shower. People do me 
the honor to say, in some of the Western papers, 
that this is traceable to some teachings of mine. It 
is too mucli honor to sucli as me. Gladly, if it 
were not fulsome vanity, would I clutch this laurel 
of having any share in the great resolute daring of 
tliat man who flinig himself against an empire in 
behaU of justice and liberty. Tiiey were not the 
bravest men who fouglit at Saratoga and Yorktown 



11 

in the war of 177G. ! no ; it was rathor those 
who flung themselves, at Lexington, few and feeble, 
against the eml)attled ranks of an empire till then 
thought irresistible. Elderly men in powdered wigs 
and red velvet smoothed their rufUes and eried ' mad- 
men.' Full-fed custom-house men said, ' A pistol- 
shot against Gibraltar!' But Capt. Ingraham, 
under the stars and stripes, dictating terms to the 
fleet of the Caesars, was only the echo of that 
Lexington gun. Harper's Ferry is the Lexington 
of to-day. Up to this moment, Brown's life has 
been one unmixed success. Prudence, skill, cour- 
age, thrift, knowledge of his time, knowledge of his 
opponents, undaunted daring in the face of the 
nation — he had all these. He was the man who 
could leave Kansas, and go into Missouri, and take 
eleven men and give them to liberty, and bring 
them off on the horses which he carried with him, 
and two which he took as tribute from their masters 
in order to flicilitate escape. Then, when he had 
passed his human proteges from the vulture of the 
United States to the safe shelter of the English 
lion, this is the brave, frank and sublime truster in 
God's right and absolute justice, that entered his 
name in the city of Cleveland, 'John Brown, of 
Kansas,' and advertised there two horses for sale, 
and stood in front of the auctioneer's stand, notify- 
ing all bidders of the defect in the title. (Laughter, ) 
BlU he added with nonchalance, when he told the 
story, 'They brought a very excellent price.' 
(Laughter.) This is the man who, in the face of 
the nation, avowing his right, and endeavoring by 
what strength he had in behalf of the wronged, 
goes down to Harper's Ferry to follow up his work. 
VV^ell, men say he failed. Every man has his 
Moscow. Suppose he did fail, every man meets his 
Waterloo at last. There are two kinds of defeat. 
Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows 



12 

notiiing ]>iit victories. Bunker Hill soldiers call a 
defojit ; but Liberty dates from it, tboufjrh Warren 
lay dead on tbe field. Men say the attempt did not 
succeed. Xo man can command success. Whether 
it was well planned, and deserved to succeed, we 
shall be able to decide when Brown is free to tt'll us 
all he knows. Suppose he did fail, he has done a 
great deal still. Why, this is a decent country to 
live in now. (Laughter and cheers.) Actually, in 
this Sodom of ours, seventeen men have been found 
ready to die for an idea. God be thanked for John 
Brown, that he has discovered or created them. 
(Cheers.) I should feel some pride, if I was in 
P^urope now, in confessing that I was an American. 
(Applause.) We have redeemed the long infamy 
of twenty years of subservience. But look back a 
bit. Is there anj'thing new about this? Nothing 
at all. It is the natural result of anti-slavery 
teaching. For one, I accept it; I expected it. I 
cannot say tliat 1 prayed for it ; I cnnnot say that I 
hoped for it. But at the same time, no sane man 
has looked upon this matter for twenty years, and 
supposed that we could go through this great moral 
convulsion, the great classes of society clashing and 
jostling against each other like frigates in a storm, 
and that there would not be such scenes as these. 

"Why, in 1835 it was the other way. Then it 
was my bull that gored your ox. Then ideas came 
in conflict, and men of violence, and men who had 
not -made up their minds to wait for the slow con- 
version of conscience, men who trusted in tlieir own 
right hands, men who believed in bowie-knives — 
why, such sacked the city of Philadelj)hia, such 
made New York to be governed ])y a mob ; Boston 
saw its T^fayor suppliant and kneeling to the chief 
of broad-clot!) in broad daylight. It was all on that 
side. The natural result, the first result of this 
starting of ideas, is like people who get half awaked, 



13 

and use the first weapons that appear to them. 
The first developing; and unfolding of national life 
wore the mobs of 1835. People said it served us 
right, we had no right to the luxury of speaking 
our own minds ; it was too expensive : these lavish, 
luxurious persons .walking about here, and actually 
saying what they think ! Why, it was like speak- 
ing loud in the midst of the avalanches. To say 
' Liberty ' in a loud tone, the Constitution of 1789 
might come down — it would not do. But now things 
have changed. We have been talking thirty years. 
Twenty years we have talked everyM'here, under all 
circumstances ; we have been mobbed out of great 
cities, and pelted out of little ones ; we have been 
abused by great men and by little papers. (Laughter 
and applause.) What is the result? The tables 
have been turned ; it is your bull that has gored my 
ox now. And men that still believe in violence, the 
five points of whose faith are the fist, the bowie- 
knife, fire, poison and the pistol, are ranged on the 
side of Liberty, and, unwilling to wait for the slow 
but sure steps of thought, lay on God's altar the 
best they have. You cannot expect to put a real 
Puritan Presbyterian, as John Brown is — a regular 
Cromwellian dug up from two centuries — in the 
midst of our New England civilization, that dare 
not say its soul is its own, nor proclaim that it is 
wrong" to sell a man at auction, and not have him 
show himself as he is. Put a hound in the presence 
of a deer, and he springs at his throat if he is a true 
bloodhound. Put a Christian in the presence of a 
sin, and he will spring at its throat if he is a true 
Christian. And so into an acid we might throw 
white matter, but unless it is chalk, it will not pro- 
duce agitation. So, if in a Avorld of sinners you 
were to put American Christianity, it would be 
calm as oil. But put one Christian like John 
Brown of Osawatomie, and he makes the whole 



14 

crystalizo into right and wrong, and marshal them- 
s Jvcs on one eid(3 or the other. And God makes 
him the text, and all he asks of our comparatively 
cowardly lips is to preach the sermon, and say to 
the American people that, whether that old man 
succeeded in a worldly sense or not, he stood a 
representative of law, of governiuent, of right, of 
justice, of religion, and they were pirates that 
gathered about him, and sought to wreak vengeance 
by taking his life. The banks of the Potoiuac, 
doubly dear now to History and to Man ! The dust 
of Washington rests there ; and History will see 
forever on that river-side the brave old man on his 
pallet, whose dust, when God calls him hence, the 
Father of his country would be proud to make 
room for beside his own. But if Virginia tyrants 
dare hang him, after this mockery of a trial, it will 
take two more \Vashingtons at least to make the 
name of the State anything l)ut abominable to the 
ages that come after. (Applause and hisses.) 
Well, I say what I really think (cheers and cries 
of 'good,' 'good.') George Washington was a 
great man. Yet I say what I really think. And 
I know, ladies and gentlemen, that, educated as 
you have been by the experience of the last ten 
years hero, you would have thought me the silliest 
as well as the most cowardly man in the world 
if I should have come, with my twenty years be- 
hind me, and talked about anything else to-night 
except that groat example which one man has 
set us on the banks of the Potomac. You ex- 
pected, of course, that I should tell you my opin- 
ion of it. 

I value this clement that Brown has introduced 
into American politics for another reason. The 
South is a great power — no cowards in Virginia. 
(Laugliter.) It was not cowardice. (Laugliter.) 
Now, I try to speak very plain, but you will misun- 



15 

derstand rae. There is no cowardice in Virginia. 
Tie South are not cowards. The lunatics in the 
Gospel were not cowards when they said, ' Art thou 
como to torment us before the time ? ' (Laughter.) 
They were brave enough, but they saw afar otf. — 
They saw the tremendous power that was enterfng 
into that charmed circle ; they knew its inevitable 
victory. Virginia did not tremble at an old gray- 
headed man at Harper's Ferry ; they trembled at a 
John Brown in every man's own conscience. He 
had been there many years,^and, like that terrific 
scene which Beckford has drawn for us in his Hall 
of Eblis, where all ran around, each man with an in- 
curable wound in his bosom, and agreed not to speak 
of it, so the vSouth has been running up and down 
its political and social life, and every man keeps 
his rigiit hand pressed on the secret and incurable 
sore, with an understood agreement, in Church and 
State, that it never shall be mentioned, for fear the 
great ghastly fabric shall come to pieces at tlie talis- 
manic word. Brown uttered it, and the whole ma- 
chinery trembled to its very base. 

I value that movement. Did you ever see a black- 
smith shoe a restless horse? H' you have, you have 
seen him take a small cord, and tie his upper lip. If 
you ask him what he does it for, he will tell you he 
does it to give the beast something to think of. — 
(Laughter.) Now, the South has extensive schemes. 
She grasps witn one hand a Mexico, and with the 
other she dictates terms to Church, she imposes con- 
ditions on State, she buys up Webster with a little, 
and Everett with nothing. (Great laughter and 
applause.) John Brown has given her something 
else to think of. He has turned her attention in- 
wardly. He has taught her that there has been 
created a new element in this Northern mind ; that 
it is not merely the thinker, that it is not merely 
the editor, that it is not merely the moral reformer, 



16 

but the idea lias porvaded all classes of pocioty. — 
Call tlioni luadmen if you will. Hard to tell ulio's 
mad. Tlie world t>ays one man is mad. John Brown 
said the sauKi of the Governor. You rememhcr the 
ma<hnan in Edinbur<;h. A friend a^^ked hini what 
he was thcM-o l(jr. ' Well,' said he, ' they said at 
home that I was mad ; and I said I was not ; but 
they had the majority.' (Laughter.) Just so it is 
in regard to John Brown. The nation says, lie ia 
mad. I appeal from Philip drunk to IMiilip so- 
ber ; I appeal from th^ American people drunk with 
cotton and the New York Observer (loud and long 
laughter) to the American peo]ile fifty years hence, 
when the light of civilization has had morc; time to 
penetrate, when self-interest has been rebuked by 
the world rising and giving its verdict on these great 
questions, when it is not a small hand of Abi^lition- 
ists, but the civilization of the nineteenth century 
that undertakes to enter the arena, and discuss its 
last great reform. When that day comes, what 
shall be thought of tliese first martyrs, who teach 
us how to live and how to die? 

Suppose John Brown had not stayed at Harper's 
Ferry ; suppose on that momentous ^londay night, 
when the excited imagiinitions of two thousand 
Charlestown people had enlarged him and his little 
1)and into 400 white men and 200 blacks, he had 
vanishe 1, and wdien the gallant troops arrived there, 
2000 strong, they had found nobody ! The moun- 
tains would have been peopled with enemies; the 
Alleghanies would have heaved with insurrection ! 
You never would have convinced Virginia that all 
Pennsylvania was not armed and on tlie hills. Vir- 
ginia has not slept sound since Nat Turner had an 
insurrection in 1831, and she bids fair ntn'cr to have 
a nap now. (Laughter.) For tliis is not an insur- 
rection ; this is the penetration of a dillerent ele- 
ment. Mark you, it is not the oppressed race ris- 



17 

ing. Recollect history. There never was a race 
held in chains that absolutoly vindicated its own 
liberty hue one. There never was a serf nor a slave 
whose own sword cut off his own chain but one. — 
Blue-eyed, light-haired Anglo-Saxon, it was notour 
race. We were serfs for three centuries, and we 
waited till commerce and Christianity, and a differ- 
ent law, had melted our fetters. We were crowded 
down into a villienage which crushed out our man- 
hood so thoroughly that we hadn't vigor enough to 
redeem ourselves. Neither did France, neither did 
Spain, neither did the Northern nor the Southern 
races of Europe have that bright spot on their es- 
cutcheon, that they put an end to their slavery. — 
Blue-eyed, haughty, contemptuous Anglo-Saxons, 
it w^as the black — the only race in the record of his- 
tory that ever, after a century of oppression, re- 
tained the vigor to wTite the charter of its emanci- 
pation with its own hand in the blood of the domi- 
nant race. Despised, calumniated, slandered San 
Domingo is the only instance in history where a 
race, with indestructible love of justice, serving a 
hundred years of oppression, rose up under their 
own leader, and with their own hands abolished 
slavery on their own soil. Wait, garrulous, vain- 
glorious, boasting Saxon, till we have done as much, 
before we talk of the cowardice of the black race. 
The slaves of our country have not risen, but, as 
in all other cases, redemption will come from the in- 
terference of a wiser, higher, more advanced civili- 
zation on its exterior. It is the universal record of 
history, and ours is a repetition of the same scene 
in the drama. We have awakened at last the en- 
thusiasm of both classes — those that act from im- 
pulse, and those that act from calculation. It is a 
libel on the Yankee to say that it includes the whole 
race, when you say that if you put a dollar on the 
other side of hell, the Yankee will spring for it at 



18 

any risk ; (lauf^litcr,) for thcro is an clement even in 
the Yankee blood that obeys ideas — there is an im- 
pulsive, entliusiastic aspiration — something left to 
lis from the old Puritan stock — that which made 
Eni^land what slie was two centuries ago — that 
which is fated to give the closest grapple with the 
Slave Power to-day. This is an invasion by outsido 
power. Civilization in IGOO crept along our shores, 
now planting her foot, and then retreating — now 
gaining a foothold, and then receding before barba- 
rism — till at last came Jamestown and Plymouth, 
and then thirty States. Harper's Ferry is perhaps 
one of llaleigli's or Goswold's colonies, vanishing 
and to be swept away ; bye-and-bye will come the 
immortal one hundred and Plymouth Kock, with 
' MANirEST DESTINY ' Written by CJod's hand on their 
banner, and the right of unlimited ' annex-\tion ' 
granted by heaven itself. 

It is the lesson of the age. The first cropping 
out of it is in such a man as John Brown. He did 
not measure liis means. He was not thrifty as to 
his method ; he did not calculate closely enough, 
and he was defeated. Wliat is defeat? Nothing 
but education — nothing Ijut the first step to some- 
thing better. x\ll that is wanted is that this public 
opinion shall not creep around like a servile coward, 
and unbought, but corrupt, disordered, insane pub- 
lic opinion proclaim that Gov. Wise, because he 
says he ie a Governor, is a Governor, that Virginia 
is a State because she says she is so. 

Thank God, I am not a citizen. You will remem- 
ber, all of you, citizens of the United States, that 
there was not a Virginia gun fired at John Brown. 
Hundreds of well-armed Maryland and Virginia 
troo])S that went there, never dared to pull a trig- 
ger. Yon shot him ! Sixteen marines, to whom 
you pay $8 a month — your own representatives. — 
When the disturbed State could not stand on her 



19 

own legs for trembling, you went tlioro and strength- 
ened the feeble knees, and liold up the palsied hand. ^ 
Sixteen men, with the Vulture ol' the Union al)ove 
them (sensation) — your representatives! It was 
the covenant with death and agreement with hell, .' 
■which you call the Union of thirty States, that took 
the old man by the throat with a pirate hand ; and 
it will be the disgrace of our civilization if a gal- / 
lows is ever erected in Virginia that bears his body. 
' The most resolute man I ever saw,' says Governor 
Wise ; ' the most daring, the coolest. I would trust 
his truth about any question. Thesincerest ! ' Sin- 
cerity, courage, resolute daring — Virginia has noth- 
ing, nothing for those qualities but a scaffold ! — 
(Applause.) In her broad dominion she can only 
afford him six feet for a grave ! God help the Com- 
monwealth that bids such welcome to the noblest 
qualities that can grace poor human nature ! Yet 
tLiat is the acknowledgment of Gov. AVise himself! 
They say it cost the officers and persons in respon- 
sible positions more effort to keep hundreds of star- 
tled soldiers from shooting the five prisoners sixteen 
marines had made, than it cost those marines to 
take the Armory itself. Soldiers and civilians — 
both alike — only a mob fancying itself a govern- 
ment ! And mark you, I have said they were not a 
government. They not only are not a government, 
but they have not even the remotest idea of what a 
government is. (Laughter.) They do not begin to 
have the faintest conception of what a civilized gov- 
ernment is. Here is a man arraigned before a jury, 
or about to be. The State of Virginia, as she calls 
herself, is about to try him. The first step in that 
trial is a jury ; the second is a judge ; and at the 
head stands the Chief Executive of the State, who 
is to put his hand to the death-warrant before it can 
be executed ; and yet that very Executive, who, ac- 
cording to the principles of the sublimest chapter in 



20 

Algernon Sidney's immortiil book, is bound by the 
very responsil^ility that rests on liim, to keep his 
mind impartial as to the p;uilt of the person ar- 
raigned, liastens down to Iliclnnond, hurries to the 
]ilatforin, and ])roclaims to the assembled Common- 
wealth of Virginia, ' The man is a murderer, and 
ought to be hung.' Almost every lip in the State 
might have said it except that single lip of its Gov- 
ernor ; and the moment he had uttered these Avords, 
in the theory of the English law it was not possible 
to impannel an impartial jury in the Commonwealth 
of Virginia ; it was not possible to get the materials 
and the machinery to try him according to even the 
ugliest pattern of English jurisprudence. And yet 
the Governor does not know that he has written 
himself down a non compos, and the Commonwealth 
that he governs supposes it is still a ( .'hristian polity. 
— They have not the faintest conception ot what 
goes to make up government. The worst Jeffries 
that ever, in his most drunken hour, climbed up 
a lamp-post in the streets of London, would not 
have tried a man who could not stand on his 
feet. There is no such record in the blackest roll 
of tyranny. If Jeffries could speak, he would 
thank God that at last his name might bo taken 
down from the gibbet of His' ry, since the Vir- 
ginia Bench has made his worst act white, set 
against the blackness of this modern infamy. 
(Applause.) xVnd yet the New York press daily 
prints the accounts of the trial. Trial ! The In- 
quisition used to break every other bone in a 
man's body, and then lay him on a pallet, giving 
him neither counsel nor opportunity to consult 
one, and then wring from his tortured mouth 
something like a confession, and call it a trial. 
But it was heaven-robed innocence compared with 
the trial, or what the New York Press call so, 
that has been going on in startled, frightened 



21 

Charlestown. I speak what I know, and I speak 
what is but the breath and whisper of the sum- 
mer breezes compared with the tornado of rebuke 
that will come back from the Press of Great 
Britain, when they hear that we affect to call 
that a jury trial, and blacken the names Judge 
and Jury by baptizing these pirate orgies with 
such honorable appellations. 

I wish I could say anything worthy of the great 
deed which has taken place in our day — the open- 
ing of the sixth seal, the pouring out of the last 
vial but one on a corrupt and giant institution. 
I know that many men will deem me a fanatic for 
uttering this wholesale vituperation, as it will be 
called, upon a State, and this endorsement of a mad- 
man. I can only say that I have spoken on this 
anti-slavery question before the American people 
twenty years ; that I have seen the day when this 
same phase of popular opinion was on the other 
side. You remember the first time I was ever pri- 
vileged to stand on this platform by the magnani- 
mous generosity of your clergyman, when New 
York was about to bully and crush out the freedom 
of speech at the dictation of Capt. Rynders. From 
that day to this, the same braving of public thought 
has been going on from here to Kansas, until it 
bloomed in the events of the last three years. It 
has changed the whole face of the sentiment in 
these Northern States. You meet with the evidence 
of it every Vv^here. When the first news from Harper's 
Ferry came to Massachusetts, if you were riding in 
the cars, if you were walking in the streets, if you 
met a Democrat or a Whig or a Republican, no 
matter what his politics, it was a singular circum- 
stance that he did not speak of the guilt of Brown, 
of the atrocity of the deed, as you might have ex- 
pected. The first impulaive expression, the first 



22 

outbreak of every man's words was, * AVhat a pity 
he did not succeed ! (r.au^hter.) AVI'iit a fool he 
was lor not going oflf Monday, when he had all he 
wanted !• How strange that he did not take his 
•victory, and march away with it!' It indicated 
the unconscious leavening of a synipatiiy with the 
attempt. Days followed on ; they commenced what 
they called their trial ; you met the same classes 
again ; — no man said he ought to be hung ; no man 
said he was guilty ; no man predicated anything of 
his moral position ; every man voluntarily and 
inevitably seemed to give vent to his indignation at 
the farce of a trial — indicative again of that un- 
heeded, unconscious, potent, but wide-spread symja- 
thy on the side of Brown. 

Do you suppose that these things mean nothing? 
What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, 
and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to- 
morr(jw the vociferated result of pul)lic oj'inion, and 
the day after is the charter of nations. The senti- 
ments we raise to intellect, and from intelltct to 
character The American people have begun to feel. 
The mute eloquence of the fugitive slave has gone 
up and down the highways and by-ways of the coun- 
try ; it will annex itself to the great American 
heart of the North, even in the most fossil state of its 
hunk'^rism, as a latent sympathy with its right side. 
This blow, like the first blow at Lexington, heard 
around the world — this blow at Harper's Ferry re- 
veals men. AV^atch those about you, and you will 
see more of the temper and unheeded purpose and 
real moral positl(;n of men than you would imag- 
ine. This is tiic way nations are to ])e judged, lie 
not in a hurry ; it will come soon enough from this 
sentiment. We stereotype feeling into intellect, 
and then into statutes, and finally into national 
character. We have got the first stage of growth. 



23 

Nature's live growths crowd out and rive dead mat- 
ter. Ideas strangle statutes. Pulse-beats wear down 
granite, whether piled in jails or capitols. The 
people's hearts are the only title-deeds, after all. 
Your Barnburners said, ' Patroon titles are unright- 
eous.' Judges replied, ' iSuch is the law.' Wealth 
shrieked, ' Vested Rights I ' Parties talked of Con- 
stitutions — still, the people said, ' Sin.' They shot 
a sheriff. A parrot press cried, ' Anarchy ! ' Law- 
yers growled, 'Murder!' — still, nobody was hung, 
if I recollect aright. To-day, the heart of the 
Barnburner beats in the statute-book of your State. 
John Brown's movement against slavery is exactly 
the same. Wait awhile, and you'll all agree with 
me. What is fanaticism to-day is the fashionable 
creed to-morrow, and trite as the multiplication- 
table a week after. . 

John Brown has stirred those omnipotent pulses — 
Lydia Maria Child's is one. She says, ' That dun- 
geon is the place fur me,' and writes a letter in mag- 
nanimous appeal to the better nature of Gov. Wise. 
She says in it, ' John Brown is a hero ; he has done a 
noble deed. 1 think he was all right ; but he is sick ; 
he is wounded ; he "wants a woman's nursing. I am an 
Abolitionist ; I have been so thirty years. I think sla- 
very is a sin, and John Brown a saint ; but I want 
to come and nurse him ; and I pledge my word that 
if you will open his prison-door, I will use the pri- 
vilege, under sacred honor, only to nurse him. I 
enclose you a message to Brown ; be sure and de- 
liver it.' And the message was, -Old man, God 
bless you ! You have struck a noble blow ; you 
have done a mighty work ; God was with you ; 
your heart was in the right place. I send you 
across five hundred miles the pulse of a woman's 
gratitude.' And Gov. Wise has opened the door, 
and announced to the world that she may go in. 



24 

John Brown lias conquered the pirate. (Applause.) 
Jlope! there i.s hope everywhere. It is only the 
universal history : 

'Ilight forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the 

throne ; 
Eut that scaffold sways the future, and behind the 

dim unknown 
Standeth (jod within the shadow, keeping watch 

above his own.' 



54 W 



